Strictly speaking, we don't know the answer. All attempts to set up literary criteria are hindsight, going after works of art with much too coarse-meshed a net. Yet we usually recognize an outstanding work when we see it. And then a shiver down the spine is just as much an organ of perception as the brain.

Still, something can be said about why Bjørneboe catches fire. He almost always took up incendiary themes -- or they began to burn after he wrote. Bjørneboe had a poor nose for the fashionable, the timely -- a rare trait among folk involved in the cultural life. He wrote unbecomingly about the quisling trials right after the war, he attacked Norwegian school policies in Jonas at a time when everybody thought these policies were an expression of incontrovertible reason, he came out early with a massive critique of society in Moment of Freedom in 1966. In return the protagonist of The Sharks stood out at the beginning of the 70s, when Marxism was the obligatory view of life in good literary circles, with his belief in the soul's immortality and a meaning in the whole cosmos.

Bjørneboe fires us with his language's expressive power, even when he goes over into flippancy and overstatement. He is never boring. And nearly everything he wrote is charged with compassion for the weak and the wretched. It is a classic writer's position, which most readers fortunately love. And it stands in opposition to the current postmodernism, which hardly sees a world outside language, where everything gets complicated and ambiguous, and literature is so world-weary that it can't manage to get involved, care, be an ethical force.

But perhaps Bjørneboe grips us most of all because the reader continually senses depths in the text. Especially in his last novels he poses great and almost forbidden questions on what kind of creature a human being is. He turns outward with power -- and revolts against injustice, suffering, war and poverty. At the same time he turns inward -- towards our unknown, inner self. And with a violent effort he makes these two sides cohere.

This tension gives dimensions to Bjørneboe. Many radical, socially engaged people easily come to believe that the world can be changed by reforms and organized action alone. The individual becomes a neutral vantage point. Many conservatives lean toward investing all their energy in the inward, in culture, in self-development. If enough people are transformed inwardly, the world will become good. For Bjørneboe both sides are necessary. We can't create a livable society without knowing more about the human being, and such insight demands a vital spiritual life. But neither are we human if we meanwhile tolerate injustice. In the poem "My heart" and the novels Moment of Freedom and The Sharks the narrator overcomes his isolation by reaching out his hand and taking care of a poor boy -- who is at the same time the neglected inner self and the real suffering of real children in an evil world. And the world becomes beautiful.

Compassion binds the soul and the world together. It is immensely painful. But so it is to be human.

Jens Bjørneboe breaks down the defense mechanisms we continually build up -- against our own interior and against the injustice outside us. This probably means that Bjørneboe is even more important in 1995 than when he was alive.

This page added September 30, 1998